Virtual care provided through telephone or videoconference has been broadly implemented in recent months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A new analysis of published studies has examined the accuracy and reliability of virtual compared with in-person cognitive assessments for diagnosing dementia or mild cognitive impairment. The analysis, which is published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, included 121 studies. Three studies comparing videoconference with in-person cognitive assessments demonstrated good reliability and accuracy of virtual cognitive assessments in diagnosing dementia. Investigators ...

An analysis of published studies indicates that Twitter may be a useful learning tool in dental education. The analysis, which is published in the Journal of Dental Education, included 7 studies. Studies indicated that the real-time question and answer sessions using Twitter work well in an educational setting. Also, the semi-anonymous interactions on Twitter can be beneficial for students unwilling to speak in front of their peers. Twitter can also make lectures more engaging, and it can be used to ask questions that assess student comprehension. The ...

A new study provides a profile of teachers around the world who provide English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education, in which the English language is used to teach academic subjects (other than English itself) in countries where the first language is not English. The study, which is published in the END ...

When investigators in the UK recorded the calls of migratory birds called thrushes at night, they found that call rates were up to five times higher over the brightest urban areas compared with darker villages. The findings, which are published in END ...

To improve our own health and the health of our planet, dietary habits will need to change. Because the composition of an optimal diet changes depending on the combination of location, season, and personalized dietary needs, investigators have built a tool that uses an extensive database of food items, nutrients, and environmental-impacts to develop optimized diets specific to an individual in a given country and month. As described in an article published in the END ...

The population growth of an endangered butterfly species is greatest in habitats with microclimatic variability, demonstrates a study carried out collaboratively by the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Helsinki Institute of Life Science of the University of Helsinki as well as the Finnish Environment Institute. Insects are often very restricted in their capacity for movement. In many species, specific stages of life are spent entirely immobile, making them dependent on the temperature and moisture conditions of their immediate surroundings. In the Åland Islands on the southwest coast of Finland, Glanville fritillary butterflies (Melitaea cinxia) spend roughly 10 months of the year in the larval stage. In the middle of summer, the newly hatched ...

Researchers from University of Texas-Austin and Copenhagen Business School published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that offers actionable guidance to managers on the deployment of algorithms in marketing contexts. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "When Algorithms Fail: Consumers' Responses to Brand Harm Crises Caused by Algorithm Errors" and is authored by Raji Srinivasan and Gulen Sarial-Abi. Marketers increasingly rely on algorithms to make important decisions. A perfect example is the Facebook News Feed. You do not know why some of your posts show up on some people's News Feeds or not, but Facebook does. Or how about Amazon recommending books and products for you? All of these are driven by algorithms. Algorithms are software ...

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - Stress levels of moms with preschoolers soared during the pandemic, with twice as many of the mothers reporting they lost sleep during the COVID-19 outbreak than before it. "Moms of young children are already less likely to get the recommended amount of sleep and physical activity than women who don't have children. These shortfalls could raise the risk for obesity and poor health, and the lockdown worsened the situation by increasing the levels of stress and household chaos," said Chelsea Kracht, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The bottom line? "Mothers, especially ...

Joyce WG, Rollot Y, Evers SW, Lyson TR, Rahantarisoa LJ, Krause DW. 2021. A new pelomedusoid turtle, Sahonachelys mailakavava, from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar provides evidence for convergent evolution of specialized suction feeding among pleurodires. Royal Society Open Science 8:210098. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210098 First author: Prof. Dr. Walter Joyce (walter.joyce@unifr.ch), Professor of Paleontology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Co-authors: - Yann Rollot (yann.rollot@unifr.ch), PhD student, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - Serjsocha Evers (serjoscha.evers@unifr.ch; preferred: serjoscha.evers@googlemail.com), ...

Researchers have discovered the most precise way to control individual ions using holographic optical engineering technology. The new technology uses the first known holographic optical engineering device to control trapped ion qubits. This technology promises to help create more precise controls of qubits that will aid the development of quantum industry-specific hardware to further new quantum simulation experiments and potentially quantum error correction processes for trapped ion qubits. "Our algorithm calculates the hologram's profile and removes any aberrations from the light, which lets us develop a highly precise technique for programming ...

A computer science engineer at Michigan State University has a word of advice for the millions of bitcoin owners who use smartphone apps to manage their cryptocurrency: don't. Or at least, be careful. Researchers from MSU are developing a mobile app to act as a safeguard for popular but vulnerable "wallet" applications used to manage cryptocurrency. "More and more people are using bitcoin wallet apps on their smartphones," said Guan-Hua Tu, an assistant professor in MSU's College of Engineering who works in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "But these applications have vulnerabilities." ...

A new USC study suggests that certain neighborhoods - particularly those characterized by poverty and unemployment - may pose an environmental risk to the developing brains of children, impacting neurocognitive performance and even brain size. The research was published May 3 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. These findings highlight the importance of neighborhood environments for child and adolescent brain development, the researchers said, and suggest that policies, programs and investments that help improve local neighborhood conditions and empower communities could support children's neurodevelopment and long-term health. "This is the first large, national study ...

Using a bit of machine learning magic, astrophysicists can now simulate vast, complex universes in a thousandth of the time it takes with conventional methods. The new approach will help usher in a new era in high-resolution cosmological simulations, its creators report in a study END ...

Many miles of streams and rivers in the United States and elsewhere are polluted by toxic metals in acidic runoff draining from abandoned mining sites, and major investments have been made to clean up acid mine drainage at some sites. A new study based on long-term monitoring data from four sites in the western United States shows that cleanup efforts can allow affected streams to recover to near natural conditions within 10 to 15 years after the start of abatement work. The four mining-impacted watersheds--located in mountain mining regions of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana--were all designated as Superfund sites under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which helps ...

A universe evolves over billions upon billions of years, but researchers have developed a way to create a complex simulated universe in less than a day. The technique, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings together machine learning, high-performance computing and astrophysics and will help to usher in a new era of high-resolution cosmology simulations. Cosmological simulations are an essential part of teasing out the many mysteries of the universe, including those of dark matter and dark energy. But until now, researchers faced the common conundrum of not being ...

As pandemic lockdowns went into effect in March 2020 and millions of Americans began working from home rather than commuting to offices, heavy traffic in America's most congested urban centers--like Boston--suddenly ceased to exist. Soon afterwards, the air was noticeably cleaner. But that wasn't the only effect. A team of Boston University biologists who study how human-related sounds impact natural environments seized the opportunity to learn how the reduced movement of people would impact local ecosystems. They found--surprisingly--that sound levels increased in some nature conservation areas, a result of cars driving faster on roads no longer choked by traffic. BU ecologist Richard Primack and Carina Terry, an undergraduate student working in Primack's ...

Spinning or rotating objects are commonplace, from toy tops, fidget spinners, and figure skaters to water circling a drain, tornadoes, and hurricanes. In physics, there are two kinds of rotational motion: spin and orbital. Earth's motion in our solar system illustrates these; the daily 360-degree rotation of Earth around its own axis is spin rotation, while Earth's yearly trip around the sun is orbital rotation. The quantity in physics defined to describe such motion is angular momentum (AM). AM is a conserved quantity: given an initial amount of it, it can be broken up and redistributed among particles such as atoms and photons, ...

BOSTON -- Immunity often calls to mind the adaptive immune response, made up of antibodies and T cells that learn to fight specific pathogens after infection or vaccination. But the immune system also has an innate immune response, which uses a set number of techniques to provide a swift, non-specialized response against pathogens or support the adaptive immune response. In the past few years, however, scientists have found that certain parts of the innate immune response can, in some instances, also be trained in response to infectious pathogens, such as HIV. Xu Yu, MD, a Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, and colleagues ...

Adults are more compassionate and are up to twice as likely to donate to charity when children are present, according to a new study from psychologists. The research, conducted by social psychologists at the University of Bath and Cardiff University and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), examined how the presence of children influences adults' compassionate motivations and behaviours. Across eight experiments and more than 2,000 participants, the researchers asked adults to describe what typical children are like. After focusing on children in this way, participants ...

A hot topic symposia session during the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2021 Virtual Meeting will discuss a multipronged approach to addressing childhood adversity and promoting resilience - at the clinical, systems, community and educational levels. The effect of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on health outcomes across the lifespan is well recognized among pediatric practitioners. Increasing the ability of healthcare providers to recognize and respond to ACEs can buffer the long-term negative physical and mental health impacts of adversity and increase patient-centered care. "In the era of COVID-19, ...

Biological organisms (such as elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, and human tongues) show remarkable dexterity and self-adaptation in unstructured environments, relying on the multiple-mode actuations of the skeleton-free muscular hydrostats. In general, muscular hydrostats mainly consist of well-ranged active 3D muscle-fiber arrays bundled by passive connective tissues (Fig. 1A). By selectively actuating the active 3D muscle-fiber arrays, muscular hydrostats can generate elongation, bending, contraction and twisting. Producing such multiple-mode actuation of muscular hydrostats is an interesting but long-lasting challenge in the field of robotics. During past decades, many artificial muscles (such ...

A Pediatric Policy Council state of the art plenary session during the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2021 Virtual Meeting explored the role of public health research in iterative policymaking to reduce gun violence in America. The toll of gun violence on young people represents one of the most significant public health challenges facing contemporary America. In recent years, firearm-related injury and death has made headlines routinely, including mass shootings at schools, public festivals, and places of worship, while daily occurrences of gun violence affect local communities. Gun ...

Originally formulated in the context of condensed matter physics, the Haldane model is an influential model of a two-dimensional topological insulator. It has also been realized in classical-wave metamaterial analogues of topological insulator, such as photonic crystals, acoustic crystals, and electric LC circuits. Recently, theorists have shown that a modification to the Haldane model exhibits the novel phenomenon of antichiral edge sates, according to E. Colomés and M. Franz, scholars at Department of Physics and Astronomy and Quantum Matter Institute, University of British Columbia. Unlike the chiral edge states associated with the standard Haldane model, antichiral edge states possess the same propagation direction on opposite edges of a sample; the current carried by the edge ...

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere, have used gene therapy to prevent learning and memory loss in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a key step toward eventually testing the approach in humans with the neurodegenerative disease. The findings are published online in advance of the June 11, 2021 issue of Molecular Therapy-Methods & Clinical Development. AD is characterized by the accumulation of clumps of misfolded proteins called amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tau tangles, both of which impair cell signaling and promote neuronal death. Current AD treatments targeting plaques and tangles address ...

Polarization-sensitive photodetectors, based on anisotropic semiconductors, have exhibited wide advantages in specialized applications, such as astronomy, remote sensing, and polarization-division multiplexing. For the active layer of polarization-sensitive photodetectors, recent researches focus on two-dimensional (2D) organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites, where inorganic slabs and organic spacers are alternatively arranged in parallel layered structures. Compared with inorganic 2D materials, importantly, the solution accessibility of hybrid perovskites makes it possible to obtain their large crystals at low cost, offering exciting opportunities to incorporate crystal out-of-plane anisotropy for polarization-sensitive photodetection. However, limited by ...